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Comment by tkahn6 | Hacker News Reader

If anyone's interested I can write up a blog post which walks one through setting up clojure + emacs + swank/slime + Leiningen on Ubuntu. It was quite a frustrating experience.

The first hit on Google for setting up a Clojure dev environment on Ubuntu is incorrect.

[Edit: removed link]

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That guide is, sadly, very out of date and ironically linking to it probably makes it more likely to turn up first in Google search results.

Which parts did you find frustrating? Did you use ELPA? I ask because I've been using Clojure for so long now that I don't run into a lot of hurdles setting up new development environments.

Speaking of ELPA. For some reason, ELPA did not work for me on MacOsX. I have just bought a mac, have no prior experience with it (my latest experience with an Apple computer is from early 1990s), so that may partially explain it. ELPA on Ubuntu was a snap, however.

As technomancy said, there's no way to tell what the issue was without more info, but was the Mac behind a proxy, by any chance? That was the issue I ran into when I first tried to use ELPA. Solved by setting url-proxy-services in Emacs:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1595418/emacs-behind-http...

There's not really any way to tell without more details.

Perhaps you were using Aquamacs? Aquamacs is a fork of Emacs that is not very well-supported since it's not cross-platform; it's impossible for people like me to test on. GNU Emacs is much more compatible: http://emacsformacosx.com

Thanks for the hint. I have not been asking for help (there are plenty of places better suited for this, the Clojure community is very supportive). I was simply sharing my experience which I thought would support the point of view expressed by the parent post. Thanks again!

I did use the ELPA. It's really a great system. That combined with lein makes clojure very easy to use.

Getting started was, as I mentioned, frustrating though. Nearly all guides recommend the old way.

There is no shortage of blog posts on the topic, but there is definitely the shortage of well-maintained and up-to-date guides.

This.

The #1 problem with people getting started with Clojure on Emacs is the huge number of blogs out there with "hey, I finally got Swank working; here's what worked for me" posts that are way out of date. The official documentation (http://github.com/technomancy/swank-clojure/blob/master/READ...) isn't stellar, but once people find it they generally get things figured out just fine.

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